


Unexploded Human Ordnance

by psocoptera



Series: Cooking With Leftovers [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Extremis, Gen, Post-Episode: s01e01, Psychological Manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-30 02:18:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael Peterson receives some visitors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unexploded Human Ordnance

**Author's Note:**

> I was really disappointed after seeing the pilot to find out Peterson wasn't going to be part of the main cast. I've had this story in my head since learning that, but I never intended to bother writing it down. But then Akela needed a team...
> 
> Mike first met Pepper in Siria's excellent [Spark](http://archiveofourown.org/works/980982), which has of course influenced my story. But, you know, I would love to get to read ten different versions of that meeting; I think they would all be a little bit different, in interesting ways. This one is mine.

Michael Peterson smelled coffee, and woke up.

Yellow. Bright.

He blinked and sat up.

He was in bed, in a bed, in a room he'd never seen before - hospital? hotel? - didn't seem right for either. Sun was streaming in through a large window, past gauzy white curtains, lighting up butter-yellow walls. There was no TV, but there was a clock on the wall - it was apparently 9:27 am - and a sign that reminded him of something from Ace's kindergarten, "Today Is" with the day and date and year.

The date was a week past what he remembered, and he rubbed at an ache in his forehead. Maybe he _was_ in a hospital. The heavy softness of the duvet over his legs, though, seemed worlds away from a thin hospital blanket, and he didn't see any medical stuff in the room. Just a low white wooden dresser, topped with glossy green potted plants, and a little table by the side of his bed holding a drinking glass and a round-bellied glass pitcher full of water.

He realized that his mouth was bone-dry and tasted like the worst hangover of his life, and he chugged down two and a half glasses of water before he felt quenched. It was cool and wonderful. Taking a deep breath afterwards, he smelled coffee again, and something yeasty and sweet, and the salty-smoky smell of - was that bacon?

He pushed back the comforter and swung his legs to the floor. He was wearing dark blue sweatpants, plush and new, and a white T-shirt, neither of which he recognized but which fit him well. His feet were bare, and the wood floor was chill, when he stood up, but not painfully so. He realized that the french door by the windows, behind more gauzy white curtains, was open, and he crossed to it and closed it, seeing a little patio outside of it, surrounded by some sort of shrubby plant with spikes of purple flowers, and beyond that, green grass, green trees, and the sparkle of the sun on a pond. The little wrought-iron table and chair on the patio were tempting, but he wanted to see if he could find some of that coffee and bacon first.

The other door of the room was ajar, and he pulled it open and stepped through.

The other room combined a little living-room area, with a sofa and a big fish-tank where the TV would be, with a sizable dining table and a galley kitchen. There was a white man in the kitchen, standing at the range poking at a sizzling skillet. He was wearing a ruffled pink gingham apron tied over a grey suit jacket, and Mike snorted a little.

The man heard him, and turned - it was the middle-aged guy from the train station, the one who'd talked to him about heroes.

"Good morning," he said easily. "There's cinnamon bread in the oven - sorry, I think I might be burning the bacon."

Mike stepped forward, and the man stepped away obligingly, into the back corner of the narrow kitchen. Mike looked down at the pan.

"You've got the heat too high," he said, turning it down, "And, look, you didn't put enough in, see? You want a few more strips in there, get enough fat to fill the pan."

The man shrugged apologetically. "I'm not eating any," he said. "Bad for your heart."

Mike shrugged and turned to the counter, where a row of mugs sat next to the coffeemaker. He poured himself a cup and inhaled, and then sipped.

It was really good coffee. The rich, bitter flavor seemed to shoot straight to his brain, and he set the mug down abruptly with a thump.

"Ace," he said, "Where the hell is my boy?"

The man pointed behind him, at the table, where Mike now noticed a cellphone. "He's with your sister Mindy," he said, "Her number's in there, along with the number for his new school, he should be there right now if you want to call. We told them you'd been in an accident, they're expecting you to want to check in as soon as you're up to it."

Mike grabbed the phone and poked through the contacts - Mindy, Lincoln Elementary, Phillip Coulson, Dr. Ron Streiten, Dr. Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Virginia Potts. He didn't dial, but held on to the phone tightly.

"Who are all these people?" he asked, looking back at the man, who was now transferring bacon to a plate covered in paper towels.

"Phil Coulson is me," the man answered, "Dr. Streiten's the lead doc on your case. The rest of them you should be meeting over the next couple days."

Mike looked down at his bare forearm, and belatedly realized the Centipede was no longer there. He twisted, and bent, but his back felt fine.

"You fixed me," he said, "You took that thing off but I'm still all better."

Coulson opened the oven and took out a loaf pan that smelled amazing.

"Mostly," he said, nodding a little, "But not quite all. We need to monitor you for awhile to make sure you're stabilized. But there's no going back all the way, can't make that zero-risk."

Mike frowned, and then walked over to the sofa, bent down, and easily lifted it.

"I'm still strong," he said.

"Strong, and hard to hurt, and there's a chance you might explode in a horrific fireball," Coulson said matter-of-factly, "I'm not going to sugar-coat it for you." He held out a plate of bacon and sliced bread. "Breakfast?"

***

They sat on the patio, and Mike ate bacon and cinnamon bread, and Coulson sipped coffee and answered questions. They were at a secure SHIELD facility, "somewhere near Bakersfield". ("A place no one will mind if you blow up," Mike filled in mentally.) His former supervisor was recovering well. As long as he remained in SHIELD custody, he wouldn't face charges or stand trial, and he was, in fact, being paid, as a consultant and research subject, eight dollars an hour, twenty-four hours a day.

"Once we're sure you're stable, we're not going to pay you to sleep," Coulson said, "But until then your sleeping data is just as useful as your waking data, and," he shrugged, "Certain influences are keen that Extremis survivors in particular be fairly compensated for their time."

("Maybe if we pay off the explosive guy he won't blow up," Mike translated. As the explosive guy in question, he felt surprisingly okay with that, and wondered why the other guys hadn't tried that when they gave him the Centipede in the first place.)

He, Mike, was wanted for medical check-in as soon as he felt ready - someone would come to his room at first, and then later on they'd want to take him over to where they had "the big equipment". (Mike had had X-rays and CT scans for his back, before he lost his insurance, he figured he knew what he was in for there.) Meanwhile he, Coulson, was actually leaving shortly. "We thought a face you'd seen before would be less disorienting," he explained. "But I have a bus to catch."

He offered Mike his hand when he left, and Mike, after a pause, shook it. It felt weirdly cold, and Mike looked at his own hand uncertainly after he'd left, trying to tell whether it was him who was running hot.

***

Dr. Streiten was an older Black man who examined him with a number of unfamiliar, incomprehensible instruments, and didn't say much other than "mm-hm" and "looking good" and "you're doing very well, Mr. Peterson". At the end of this, Mike was cleared to take a shower, and when he came out of the bedroom (wearing another white T-shirt and blue sweatpants, several sets of which he'd found in the dresser) there was someone else standing in the living room area, looking at the fish tank.

It was another middle-aged white guy, this one wearing a purple shirt and hippie sandals. "Oh, sorry," he said, turning away from the fish, "They said you were ready for me."

Mike shrugged. "I'm not going anywhere," he said, "Sure. Hi."

"Sorry, right," the man said. "I'm Bruce." He stuck out his hand. Unlike Coulson, he felt normally warm; maybe Coulson had just had cold hands.

Mike remembered the list of names in the new cellphone. "Dr. Banner? You my next round of medical tests?"

"Not that kind of doctor," Bruce said, motioning him over to the table. "Just want to chat for a bit."

Mike sat, and waited.

"Most of the people you'll see here are going to want to talk to you about the what and how," Bruce told him. "Centipede, Extremis, how it all works, what it means for you. I'm interested in the why."

"The why?"

"The choice to get an alien device embedded in your arm isn't entirely intuitive," Bruce said, mouth twisting as if smiling at some private joke. "SHIELD thinks they can prevent this sort of thing by controlling the technology. I think we need to understand the circumstances that make that choice make sense."

Mike frowned. "So, what, you're gonna make, like, DARE for superpowers?" he said dubiously. "You know those programs don't work, right?"

"Maybe not," Bruce said, "But I don't think SHIELD is getting the genie back in the bottle, either. So... tell me about it?"

And Mike found himself explaining about his injury, his wife, Ace, and the promises that had been made to him, and broken.

Bruce nodded along, asked Mike to clarify things, and didn't react much no matter what Mike said. He didn't take notes, but he seemed to recall everything Mike told him, and by the end of their conversation Mike felt like his past had been gone over with a magnifying glass.

Bruce thanked him for his time, and then, as he was leaving, turned back.

"I guess they gave you my number," he said. "I don't always answer my phone. But if you ever think of anything else that might be helpful, or you want to know how the project is going, you can give me a call. We might need, uh, DARE counselors, at some point, if you'd be interested."

***

Mike thought about it, through the rest of the afternoon, which _was_ medical again, and dinner, which was dropped off on a tray. (He'd had a choice of chicken or lasagna. Lunch had been cold cuts in the fridge.) He tried to picture himself, coming into classrooms, maybe school assemblies, telling kids not to make the same mistakes he had made.

They'd had him in the MRI machine for what seemed like hours, and he hadn't had anything else to do other than think. The more he thought about it, trying to imagine how he would tell the part of the story where he went back to the factory, the worse he felt. Sure, Coulson had said his former boss was doing well. But losing control like that - it horrified him. How much of it had been the Centipede, and how much was just _him_ , some darkness that had lurked in him all these years? He'd never lifted a hand to his wife, or Ace. But he could remember times he almost did, times he thought about it, times he had to take a deep breath and walk away from Ace's toddler tantrums. Not to mention, he could still blow up any time, according to Coulson. How could he go into classrooms if he might explode and kill everyone? How could he even be around his son?He'd imagined he could be a hero, but maybe he was the bad guy. Maybe his origin story was the story of a villain.

He slept horribly, and was feeling pretty low when he stumbled out of bed the next morning.

There was yet another white guy sitting at his table.

This one was younger, sitting with his arms crossed with an expressionless face. Mike rubbed his eyes and realized he recognized that face, that he'd seen him in footage from the Battle of New York. Hawkeye.

("Ask for his autograph, dad!" Ace piped up in his mind. Then Mike recalled his thoughts from the night before. If he was a villain, could Hawkeye be the hero assigned to oppose him?)

He approached the table cautiously.

"I don't do bacon," Hawkeye said tersely, when he got about ten feet away. "But," he relented, "I did bring donuts. On the counter."

Mike went and lifted the lid of the box. There was a mixture of chocolate and glazed, one missing.

He took a glazed, and went back to sit across from Hawkeye.

"They think you've hit the point where you're going over it again and again in your head," Hawkeye said without preamble, "And they sent me to talk you down. It's supposed to be good for me too."

Mike took a bite of his donut. "They think that?" he said carefully. "Do you think that?"

"I think nobody has any idea what's going on in your head and we shouldn't act like we do," Hawkeye said. "All this comfort theater," he gestured around at the room, "Someone probably said, hey, blue is a calming color, let's make the living room blue, maybe it'll help." He shook his head. "Whatever. Either you're going to pick yourself up and go on, or you're not, and anything I'm going to say is irrelevant."

"So why'd you even come?" Mike asked, looking around at the blue walls in a new light.

"Orders," Hawkeye said, "Well, and they're comping me for the donuts."

"Sounds like you already made up your mind about me," Mike said.

"No!" Hawkeye snapped. "I'm saying _you_ get to make up your mind about you."

He leaned forward. "Look," he said, "At some point someone is going to write something in your file about the influence of an alien device and what kind of risk they think you pose in the future. Your Fault, Not Your Fault, 10% Your Fault, whatever. What I'm saying is I don't care. If I'm taking the shot," he pointed at Mike's forehead, "I'll take it if it needs to be taken, whatever they decided in your file. If I _don't_ need to take it, then, great. Whatever story you want to tell yourself about that, not my problem."

Hawkeye had half-stood up, by the end of his speech, hands braced on the table. He looked down at them and blinked. "Huh," he said to himself, "I guess she was right I would find something to say."

He pushed away from the table and snagged the box of donuts.

"Don't call me," he said, "I don't answer my phone, I'm not your damn sponsor, goodbye."

On his way out the door, he reached down into the box, and, without looking, tossed one more glazed donut over his shoulder, landing it neatly on the table in front of Mike.

***

Hawkeye hadn't exactly been encouraging, but Mike found that he felt a little better about everything anyways. Maybe it was the donuts.

His medical tests that day were more active than the previous. Dr. Streiten had by now been joined by a whole squadron of young, earnest people in lab coats and chilly gloves. They stuck sensors all over his head, chest, and back, and then had him run on a treadmill for awhile, and then lift some light weights. Then he got to sit and watch a Kings game; it had been taped a couple of days ago, but Mike hadn't heard any news or seen any scores since he'd been at the SHIELD facility, so it was nearly as good as watching live. It was close, but the Kings pulled off the win in a shootout. Mike thought of what Hawkeye had said about the blue walls and wondered if they had deliberately picked a game where the Kings won; he must have missed a couple, by now.

He wondered if he'd still be there when the Lakers regular season started, and if they'd let him have a TV in his room.

The goo they'd used on the sensors did _not_ want to come off in the shower, and Mike scrubbed and scrubbed, thinking about his visitors so far. When he got out, he sat down on the sofa, and watched the fish. Man, he wanted a TV in here.

When the outer door opened, he wasn't surprised.

It was a woman this time, a skinny white woman in a suit and sky-high heels. She came right over to him. "Mr. Peterson," she said, extending her hand. "I'm Virginia Potts. It's so nice to meet you."

"You must be the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come," he said, standing up to shake her hand.

She smiled. "I'm sorry?"

"Tonight you will be visited by three spirits?" he said. "Had the past, the present - you must be the future, I just hope you're not here to show me a grave."

Her smile stayed fixed for an instant, and Mike's take on the situation flipped over from "I am on to you guys" to "mouthing off to a white lady". He started to look for the words for an apology.

And then her smile changed; it hadn't seemed fake before, but now it was unmistakably genuine and warm. "You're not wrong," she said, "Just, how did you know about Coulson?"

"Coulson?" he repeated, confused.

"Oh," she shook her head, "Anyways. I am here to talk about your future."

She sat on the sofa, and motioned to him to join her.

"SHIELD is going to try to recruit you if they think you're stable," she said. "Sorry for just plunging in like this, I had to squeeze you in between two other meetings. SHIELD isn't a _bad_ option - there are a lot of people out there who will use you more ruthlessly, and less carefully for you. They'll be watching you forever anyways, it's... convenient for everyone to keep you in-house."

Mike nodded. He'd had "watching me forever" in the back of his mind ever since "still might explode", and it didn't even seem unreasonable. It was like the thickness of the walls, between his suite and the hall to the medical wing. He was a bomb, no getting around it.

"But what I want to tell you is, you have choices. Even if you're not stabilized."

She waved around the room, the way Hawkeye had. "Right now you're in the cocoon," she said. "Designed for the three Cs, to make you feel calm, comfortable, and in control. But if you stick with SHIELD, they're going to start testing you, throwing more and more at you to see if you can handle it. If you want to go into the field, that means live fire exercises, seeing how you handle failure, all kinds of… hard stuff."

"What I want you to remember is - " she pointed her hands at him, the crux of the sales pitch - "If you do fail, or if you just get sick of it and don't want to play any more, we will find another place for you. You are not the first Extremis survivor, or even the fifth. Even if you can't stabilize long-term, even if you're living with that ticking clock, you can still make a difference. You might choose to fight wildfires - fire season is getting worse every year in the West, you could set backburns right up near the front line. We have somebody doing that. Or there's someone else rescuing border-crossers down in Arizona, it turns out when you can run a hundred miles a day with a ten-gallon bottle on your back, you can save people in some pretty remote areas." Potts met his eyes. "She figures when she blows, odds are pretty good there won't be anyone nearby."

"You think I won't be stable?"

"No!" Potts said. "They tell me it looks really good for you. I just wanted to let you know," she said, "The part where you're desperate and alone? You're done with that part. And your son - the foundation will provide for your son if it ever comes to that," she added. "Just so you know."

"Nobody gave a shit about me or my son until I put that thing on my arm," Mike said bitterly. "Seriously, have you met this guy Bruce? He thinks he's going to talk people out of using tech like that, how's he going to do that if you're showing up to fairy-godmother anyone dumb enough to try it?"

Potts smiled sadly. "I do know Bruce," she said, "And - you're not wrong." She took a deep breath. "All I can say is," she said, "Here we are now, and Extremis survivors are my particular interest."

He didn't want to stare at her too long and look threatening, so he looked at the fish, then back at her, then at the fish, then back at her.

"You lost somebody," he guessed. "Um. I'm sorry."

Potts smiled again. "I didn't, actually, the way you're thinking." Something in her handbag bleeped, and her expression turned apologetic. "I'm going to have to go," she said, and stood up. "But you can call me. Tell me how I can do this better."

Mike started to stand up to see her out, and then it hit him, the other possibility. It seemed crazy. But she had met Dr. Banner _somewhere_ , and she seemed to know a lot about what SHIELD was going to do with him.

He realized he'd frozen halfway up from the sofa, and she was nearly out the door.

"You - ?" he called, and couldn't even put it into words, just pointed mutely to his forearm.

"Make it out of the cocoon," she said, "And I'll tell you about it."

Mike sank back onto the sofa, trying to imagine what kind of desperation had made an obviously rich white woman sign up for the Centipede. Injury, he thought. Car accident, or, like, skiing or something.

And she was stabilized, he thought. She wasn't spending her life running around the empty desert.

For the first time since waking up, he went into the bathroom and looked deliberately into the mirror.

There was a mark on his forehead, like a mosquito bite over a bruise, and his stubble looked terrible.

He stared at himself and watched his eyes flare and fade, yellow and brown.

That was what they had all been looking at, everyone who had seen him here. A lit fuse, burning down; a lit match, held over an open gas can. Nobody had flinched, or stood at a distance.

He reached into his pocket, and pulled out the cellphone. It hadn't left his side, except for the MRI.

He chose the first number.

"Mindy," he said when she picked up, "Mindy, it's me, Mike - I'm okay. Can you put on my boy?"

**Author's Note:**

> "Marley was dead, to begin with..."


End file.
